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As the major search engines become ever more precise, the ways in which you analyze your site must become more precise as well. However, the metrics change so much that it can be quite difficult for all but the SEO professional to keep up with what is actually important. Here are five metrics that are definitely affecting your search engine ranking.

1 – Site Speed

You may be aware of your site speed and when it needs to be improved, but you may not have been aware that it was one of the most important metrics when it comes to search engine ranking. Yes, the major search engines are keeping track of how fast your site loads from all platforms, including mobile platforms. Among other things, this means that building a separate mobile site is a virtual imperative in order to compete on an international level these days.

The content on your website is not one-size-fits-all by any means. In order to determine what is really driving consumer interest, you must look at the on-site social momentum in an organized fashion. This can help you to determine the site pages that should function as your landing pages for PPC ads and other advertising methods. Your homepage is most likely not the page that is driving traffic.

3 – External Momentum

The major search engines no longer take snapshots of your social media content in a random fashion in order to determine relevance. Today’s search engines can determine the acceleration or deceleration of the activity on your brand online. They use these stats in order to determine the popularity of your site.

The likes and reposts and retweets and other metrics that involve consumer interest are also kept by the major search engines. Moreover, aggregated social momentum over all of your platforms is a great metric to look over when you want to determine the growth of a brand or a product sale effort.

4 – New Leads Generated

This is one of the most important metrics that you can keep track of and improve over time. When it comes to momentum, the major search engines want to see a slow acceleration of new leads generated by your content. These leads can be generated by you, but most of them should be generated by your customers and your fans. You can take a good hard look at these statistics using a wide variety of tools that are easily available online.

5 – Blog Content

Not only should you be tracking your own content, but you should also be tracking the content of your competition. Some of the easiest content to track is on tastemaking blogs. This is also one of the most effective ways to track content, as content on blogs has the potential to reach a much wider audience.

You can also take note of the frequency with which your competition posts blogs and when those blogs are published. Most of the time, they are doing this with a certain plan that they have already analyzed. You may be able to piggyback off of their strategy to obtain views and conversions of your own.

This article is written in collaboration withMattan, Founder and CEO ofWebitMD Inc.